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The good news is that U.S. corporations have more than $1 trillion in mad money piling up on their balance sheets, a portion of which is available to fund big share repurchases again in 2013. The bad news is that not every buyback rewards common shareholders by reducing the share count.

Many buybacks don't take shares out of the market. While the 500 largest U.S. public companies have repurchased about a quarter of their equity's dollar value since 1998, the number of shares outstanding actually grew more than 7% in that time, reports S&P Dow Jones Indices (us.spindices.com). Companies routinely announce they're "retiring" shares in a press release, but then don't pull the trigger. Some put repurchased shares in a reserve to fulfill employee stock-option plans or to have on hand as currency for mergers. That makes buybacks hard for investors to follow.

Companies have to match employee-option exercises share for share, and so tend to overstock their own treasuries to avoid having to issue new equity, explains Howard Silverblatt, S&P senior index analyst: "The last thing management wants to see is dilution that casts earnings per share and other performance metrics in a bad light."

If it's difficult for companies to predict how these competing needs will play out, imagine how tough it is for investors to track them over the year, or several years. Ideally, you'd like to see declining totals in that portion of the earnings statement that says something about "common shares outstanding." Unfortunately, that line often gets left out of abridged statements on popular financial Websites.

One exception is Morningstar. Type a company's ticker into Morningstar's free quote box (financials.morningstar.com) and the site will display the visitor's choice of up to five years or five quarters of "weighted average shares outstanding." Subscribe to the $195-a-year service (morningstar.com) and you can see 10 quarters or 10 years of share totals.

These totals aren't precise enough to rely on for short-term trades, but the long-term investor can see the overall trend at a glance. Again, historical share counts provide only intimations of whether reduced share float will buoy the share price. In all, companies repurchased about $38 billion in shares in the first three quarters of 2012, up from $34 billion in the same period of 2011. But the numbers are highly elastic from quarter to quarter and have little predictive value.

ANOTHER PLACE TO GET a handle on a different sort of corporate-stock purchase is on Yahoo! Finance's free insider-transactions link (finance.yahoo.com). See whether, on balance, insiders are buying or selling shares. Studies have shown that insiders seem to have a knack for being on the right side of share-price movements.

Individual insiders may have a personal reason to buy or sell—like, say, paying college tuition—but what they do as a group is more telling. It's not encouraging if Yahoo's "net shares purchased (sold)" is negative. But a positive number suggests the majority of those who know a company best want a bigger piece of it. Would executives be adding to their personal holdings if they expected the share price to fall?

There may even be a silver lining when a company inexplicably buys its shares toward the high end of their 52-week price range. Insiders exercising their options drive a large part of share repurchases, Silverblatt explains, and they may be bullish on the company's prospects despite the seemingly high price.

It also doesn't hurt if insiders hold a healthy percentage of shares, a number found under the Yahoo! major-holders link. The more shares that managers own, the more aligned their interests are with those of common shareholders.

A buyback notice should just be the start of your research. Sound like too much work? You could let The Buyback Letter (buybackletter.com) sort the sheep from the goats for you. Editor David Fried claims his model portfolio is up 443% since its March 1997 inception. For $195 a year, Fried screens out prospects that don't reduce float, or have net insider sales, or are just bad values. Subscribers get e-mail recommendations in advance to additions to the model portfolio.